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Aldi vs. Lidl: how do they use Facebook and Twitter?

Lidl surprised consumers in the UK recently with its new TV campaign that aimed to alter perceptions of the brand.

Popular opinion suggests that you get what you pay for at Lidl, so the products match the low, low prices.

However the #LidlSurprises ads play on that image by showing consumers who are pleasantly surprised at the quality of the retailer’s various produce.

The campaign comes as the grocery chain is plotting a £220m UK expansion that will help it to further capitalise on its already soaring sales figures, with revenue expected to reach £4bn in 2014 up from £2bn in 2010.

It’s rival for the crown of the people’s favourite budget retailer comes in the form of Aldi, which achieved sales growth of 35.3% in Q1 2014.

Both retailers have been trying to reinvigorate their marketing with a focus on digital and social media, so I thought it would be interesting to see what Lidl and Aldi are up to on Facebook and Twitter…

Facebook

Looking purely at the number of fans, Aldi has its nose in front with 720,000 compared to 660,000 for Lidl.

But as we know, it’s not all about the size of your fan base. So how do these two retailers keep their communities engaged?

Well Aldi sticks to the age old social media tactic of tricking people into liking its content by offering incentives and rewards.

It’s a fairly cynical way of artificially generating activity on your brand page, and Facebook was supposed to be clamping down on this tactic.

During the spring and summer months Aldi posted a couple of updates each week, but that has now increased to daily posts which nearly all beg for ‘likes’ and comments.

It’s pretty lame really, and an expensive way to run a Facebook page as it means Aldi is constantly giving away vouchers. On the plus side, it frequently receives more than 10,000 ‘likes’.

Even the posts that don’t explicitly incentivise engagement try to suggest that people should hit the ‘like’ button.

The most interesting thing Aldi has done recently was to accept a nomination for the Ice Bucket Challenge, after which it nominated M&S and Waitrose.

Lidl also does its fair share of asking people to ‘like’ its updates, though it’s not as persistent as its rival.

Much of the content is focused around product or recipe suggestions alongside questions aimed at getting people to comment and share.

This gets much lower levels of fan interaction, with typically only a few hundred ‘likes’ and shares on each post.

Lidl does a pretty good job of responding to user comments, particularly if they’re making a complaint.

The exact operating hours are laid out in the ‘About’ information, which includes weekends. In contrast, Aldi doesn’t appear to monitor user comments and only responds to users if they have won a competition.

Finally, though the #LidlSurprises TV campaign has generally been well-received, there are only two references to it on the brand’s Facebook page.

On 28 August Lidl posted a sneak preview of the ad, and has subsequently used the hashtag only once.

This doesn’t reflect well on Lidl’s claims to be making a greater effort to use social media as part of its marketing strategy.

Twitter

Aldi’s Twitter feed is also very much focused on promotions and competitions.

In the past week it has hosted three different giveways, with prizes including a £50 voucher, baking items and a high chair.

Each competition involves a different hashtag and a request to submit an idea or an image.

For example, the #MessyFace campaign asked mums to tweet a picture of their baby’s face in return for the chance to win a high chair.

It becomes a bit repetitive, but is also guaranteed to keep the brand’s 97,000 followers engaged.

These stats were reiterated during the Content Marketing and Native Advertising roundtable hosted at the Econsultancy office this week.

The attendees came from a wide range of companies and roles within the industry, and I wanted to share the key takeaways with you, along with some interesting statistics I found during my prior research.

Moosejaw is a US-based retailer and ecommerce store specialising in outdoor recreation apparel and equipment.

What separates Moosejaw from its competitors is its consistently hilarious and quirky tone of voice that runs through all of its website copy, advertising and customer service channels.

I talked to Moosejaw’s CEO Eoin Comerford and customer service director Chad Caudhill about the importance of brand tone of voice, how it effects the company culture, its perception in the wider ecommerce world and the benefits of being an engaging, off-the-wall brand with bucket load of acerbic charm.

What kind of content marketing metrics should you be measuring, to determine whether you have the right strategy in place? Which metrics are the best indicators of success?

Back in 2012 we published some research on attitudes to measuring content marketing. After surveying 1,300 marketers we found that unique visitors was the main metric used to determine whether content was successful, followed by views, and then time spent on site.

These are perfectly reasonable things to track, and they are meaningful to a point, but most businesses will only invest in things that affect profits and sales. With that in mind, views and visits might not be best thing to focus on.

So what are the best content marketing metrics to track? After all, there’s more to life than visitors and page impressions, right?

According to a newly-published study published by Pew, nearly three-quarters of Facebook users polled said they didn’t know that Facebook generates and stores data about their interests and traits, and, when they came to learn this, over half indicated that they were uncomfortable with Facebook’s practice.

Mastercard, the third-largest credit card processor in the US, has announced a new policy that will make it more difficult for some businesses to automatically convert free trials into recurring subscriptions.